the course of their day, they had dealings with a large number of people in Glens Falls and, unknowingly, spread the mutated virus to many of their contacts.
On Monday, after a long hard day and with an early start on Tuesday ahead of them, the children were already in bed by ten. Jim and Elaine also decided to have an early night. They still were suffering from mild headaches and running noses but they did not suspect they were infected with something much more serious than a summer cold.
Jim, whose infection with the new virus was now more than thirty hours old, would never find out.
The mature cells of the new virus that were more than twenty-four hours old had started to produce small quantities of a lethal enzyme not usually found in the human body until close to death.
When we go to sleep, our brains naturally produce essential chemical messengers to tell the heart, lungs and other vital organs to keep on functioning even though we are fast asleep. The lethal enzyme produced by the new virus slowed and eventually cut off the brain’s production of these chemical messengers.
While Jim was awake, the presence of the enzyme in his body did not matter, but as he fell into a deep sleep, it became fatal. Without the production of the chemical messengers in sufficient quantities, his vital organs quietly shut down. His breathing gradually slowed and became shallower and, just after midnight, his heart stopped beating. Thus, he became the first victim of the Sleeping Death Contagion, or SDC, as it became known.
Elaine, who was asleep in their queen-size bed beside him, did not notice anything wrong or particularly different, except he was not snoring loudly as he usually did when he was in a deep sleep. When she was wakened by their alarm at seven the next morning, she was devastated to find she could not wake Jim up and that his body was cold. In a blind panic, she discovered he was not breathing and she could find no pulse.
She had no way of knowing that Jim was to be the first of more than seven billion SDC fatalities, including herself and her children.
Part 1: The Contagion Spreads
In shock and despair, Elaine called their next-door neighbors and close friends, Peter and Mary West. They came over immediately to help her cope with the tragedy of Jim’s death. They called 911. An ambulance was immediately dispatched and it arrived in less than ten minutes.
The ambulance attendants confirmed Elaine’s fears. They estimated that Jim had died several hours earlier.
They were very perplexed about the cause of death and they immediately transferred Jim’s body into the ambulance to take it to the hospital. They were sure that the medical officer in charge would order an immediate autopsy to determine how and why Jim had died.
Elaine and the children were in shock and, in their misery, hardly noticed the mild cold like symptoms of runny noses and mild headaches from the infection passed on from Jim on Sunday. The comforting hugs and embraces that Peter and Mary gave to Elaine, Michael and Susan inevitably resulted in them becoming infected with the deadly SDC virus themselves.
In this, they joined a growing number of people in Glens Falls already infected by the virus. Most of the Glens Falls Library staff members, who had been exposed to Elaine during her workday, were already suffering the summer-cold symptoms of SDC. Several library users served by Elaine the previous day were also infected.
Although Michael did not attend his computer day camp on Tuesday because of his father’s death, all twelve of the students and the two teachers at the day camp were already infected. Their close contact with Michael on Monday had sealed their fate.
Susan had a busy day on the cash register at the hardware store on Monday, serving almost a hundred customers. She had taken her lunch break with two friends at the pizza restaurant next door. As a result, and due to the very infectious nature of SDC, many of the people she had contact with were infected and destined to be among the first victims.
By Tuesday, SDC had now infected more than a hundred residents of Glens Falls and the immediate area. The virus that had been spread by Elaine and the children was extensive. However, it was localized to the Glens Falls area at this point.
This was not true at all for Jim. His Monday trip to New York had given SDC the opportunity to spread its deadly infection across the United States and to several other countries and continents. This was long before anyone recognized the grave threat to the entire human race.
On the Monday-morning flight from Albany to New York, Jim was sitting beside an older couple who had just completed a three-week visit with their son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren in Albany. They were returning to their home, a small village in southern Italy.
The Albany-to-New York Laguardia flight was the first leg in the long trip home. They caught the Monday-evening Alitalia flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Rome. Their close contact with Jim on the short flight was enough to infect them both. This ensured SDC was able to cross the Atlantic to begin a first point of infection in Europe.
On the crowded airport bus Jim caught from LaGuardia to Manhattan, he was in close contact with several people. Most, like himself, were visiting New York on business. They had come there from all over the northeastern United States. They were just in town for the day.
On Monday night, they returned to their homes, taking the virus from their contact with Jim with them. Several of the airport employees who had been exposed to Jim took SDC into their homes across New York City.
The trade show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center was well attended by people from Boston, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami. There were many local attendees from the New York area. There were also international visitors to the conference from Ottawa, London, Paris and Stockholm. Jim came into close contact with many of these people as he attended a couple of the seminars in the morning and early afternoon.
Later in the afternoon, he gave his own presentation on the practical use of advanced fingerprint-recognition systems. This was a topic of great interest to many of the people at the conference. The conference room where he gave his presentation was filled to capacity.
More than a hundred people attended his session, including many of the international visitors. Some of the attendees stayed on after the formal presentation to ask Jim specific questions and seek advice on carrying out pilot projects of their own.
Because of the extended exposure in a room with poor air circulation, almost half the attendees at the session left already infected by the SDC virus. In Jim’s shared taxi back to the airport that evening and on his flight back to Albany, more people were infected.
Because Monday was the last day of the conference, most of the infected people returned to their homes that same evening. By the time Jim went to bed at eleven on Monday, the SDC virus he had caught on Sunday had already infected more than two hundred new victims. About a hundred were in the Glens Falls area and another fifty were in the New York City area.
SDC had already been carried into nearly thirty homes in Boston, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Miami and Ottawa. The flights carrying it west to Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles and east to Italy, England, France and Sweden were still in the air when Jim died in his sleep just after midnight. In the next few hours, they would all land and take their deadly disease to start more than twenty new points of infection. The deadly contagion, although not yet diagnosed by anyone, was now unstoppable.
The SDC virus grew quickly in the bloodstreams of the infected victims. In less than twenty-four hours
